Exocog: A case study of a new genre in storytelling

The evolution of storytelling: Now underway

One of the oldest known human activities is that of
telling stories. It's an important part of how we educate
ourselves,
pass down culture across generations, and entertain each
other. Throughout the ages, storytellers have adapted their
art to take advantage of changes in technology -- moving
from cave walls to stone tablets to papyrus to sheaves of
paper to the printing press. It should be no surprise, then,
that some storytellers are looking at computers and the Internet
with interest. This is not simply a matter of how they might
use the Web as a publishing or distribution source for their
stories, but how the special characteristics of the Internet
can affect and change the nature of creating, telling, and
experiencing stories.

What follows is a detailed look at one experiment in this
evolution of storytelling. My partners and I wrote and released
a story on the Internet not as narrative text, but as a set
of Web sites whose content evolved over five weeks. The story
was conveyed by the changes that occurred in these Web sites
and in the events that those changes implied in the minds
of the readers. As a result, the experience of watching this
story unfold was perhaps more like playing a game than reading
a book. To me, what is significant in this experiment is
the balance between the opportunities that arise from the
new technologies and the things that stay the same. This
evolutionary process is still underway, but enough has happened
to make this a reasonable time to look around and think about
where this combination of technology and the creative arts
is today, and where it might go tomorrow.

Early experiments with storytelling
using computers and the Internet

The first experiments with computers and storytelling took
two forms. In the mid-1980s, some adventurous authors created
stories as hypertext or hypermedia structures. They broke
a story into a collection of passages, and used a hypertext
system to connect the passages into a web that readers could
explore however they chose [1]. These stories were first
built with experimental software or commercial packages such
as HyperCard, but the future transition of these experiments
to the Web was inevitable. From a literary perspective, these
authors were challenging the traditional notion of narrative:
the unfolding of the story's events was less a matter of
the author's design than of the reader's own interests. At
the same time, computer-based stories emerged that were similar
to the childhood "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.
Here, the author still defined the flow and narrative structure
of the story, but allowed the reader to make decisions on
behalf of the protagonist -- "Should Sir Gawain slay the
dragon, or try to reason with it?" Story fragments corresponding
to both alternatives were provided by the author, thus producing
a tree (an acylic graph, actually) of stories, with each
path through the tree amounting to a separate narrative.

These were worthwhile experiments, but ultimately they were
not successful. Hypertext hasn't worked as a literary device
beyond an experimental niche: It would seem that there really is value
to an author building and unrolling the narrative structure
of a story. Similarly, the Choose Your Own Adventure idea
failed to become much more than an interesting novelty for
children: It's hard enough to write one good story
around a plot and set of characters, let alone many. So the
search for an interesting convergence of storytelling and
computers moved on.

A new approach to storytelling,
from an unlikely source: Product marketing

From its beginning, product marketing groups saw great value
in the Web as a marketing device, none more so than those
who were promoting movies and other entertainment products.
The first uses of the Web for entertainment marketing tended
to take the form of what might be called "press-kit sites:"
Web-based versions of the kinds of information traditionally
given out to the press to publicize a movie, such as a synopsis
of the movie, biographies, photographs, and interviews with
the cast and crew. Given the Web's fluency with media, sites
built around this content grew to include downloads of movie
trailers, a broader collection of photographs and video clips,
and computer-based giveaways like movie-themed desktop wallpaper
and screensavers. Some sites also began to offer simple Flash-based
games themed around the movie: a spy movie site might have
a target practice game and offer a special video clip or
picture as the prize for scoring above a certain level.

The use of the Web as a promotional device took a significant
step forward with the faux Web site built for the 1995 film The
Blair Witch Project. The marketing
team working with the filmmakers constructed a site that
used a variety of Web-based media to tell the purported history
of the witch depicted in the movie. In keeping with the pseudo-documentary
style of the movie, the site was presented in a completely
factual manner -- there was nothing on the site to suggest
that the witch and her history were anything but real. The
site caught the interest of its audience, logging over 75
million hits throughout its release, and is widely recognized
as the basis for the movie's success in the marketplace [2].
The Blair Witch site was hardly the first movie-oriented
website, nor the first faux site to appear on the Web, but
it was a landmark in showing how the Web could be used to
tell stories in a way that was new, different, and appealing
to large numbers of people.

Blair Witch was a relatively static site: It was
presented as a Web-based publication of an investigation
of the witch, and did not change much after it was posted.
But, of course, many Web sites in the real world change on
a regular basis. Could a story be told by gradually evolving
one or more Web sites over time, with the story growing out
of the changes in the sites and, perhaps more importantly,
the visitors' interpretations of these changes? This challenge
was taken up by a team from Microsoft Game Studios, who created
a Web-based project, known informally as The Beast to
promote Steven Spielberg's movie Artificial Intelligence (2001).
(The sites that made up The Beast are no longer live,
but archives of them are available at the Cloudmakers site.)
This project was built around a carefully-plotted story related
to the movie's plotline of a future time in
which humans coexist with human-like, artificially intelligent
creations. The story evolved over the 12 weeks leading up
to the release of the movie, and was told through the creation
and frequent updating of a collection of 35 Web sites augmented
with mailing lists that visitors could join, voice mail,
faxes, clues in print ads and TV commercials, and in-person
events. This approach was designed to create an immersive
experience, placing the visitor directly into an Internet-based
version of the world envisioned by its creators. All the
project content was designed to fit together and change in
sync with the real-time evolution of the story, just as if
it were really happening. Like the Blair Witch site
before it, this project created a huge amount of publicity
for the movie, drawing about two million unique visitors
over five months [10]. The Beast was a unique experiment
in marketing of any form, and was a significant step forward
in our understanding of the nature of stories and games,
and how they influence -- and are influenced by -- the medium
of the Internet.

Meanwhile, parallel changes have begun taking place in the
videogame world, where more and more story content is being
incorporated into games and game-related books and Web content
to provide motivation for the games' action sequences. These
two trends -- games as stories and stories as games -- recently
came together in the campaign created by 42
Entertainment (a company formed by
the creators of The Beast) for Bungie's video game Halo
2, via the I
Love Bees site. Starting as a simple Web
site for a Napa Valley honey company, the site evolved over
three months to tell a story of how an AI entity had crash-landed
on Earth, took control of the I Love Bees site as
it attempted to reconstruct itself after the crash, and began
to interact with -- even threaten -- the innocent owners
of the site and the broader community of people experiencing
the story. As players attempted to understand the site's
ongoing evolution by working through ambiguous and sometimes
confusing content, puzzles, telephone calls from the
game to phones throughout North America, and other game-related
activities, they were rewarded with downloadable audio files
that, when properly ordered, created a ten-hour audio play
related to the story underlying Halo 2 [9]. And so
the merge, or cross-connection, of these genres continues.

Design principles for Web-based storytelling

Other projects have followed in the footsteps of those above,
some more successful than others. But in our current pre-theoretic
state, all have contributed valuable information in helping
us understand what does and doesn't work in this use of Web
sites as storytelling devices. Looking over a broad collection
of these experiments, a rough set of design principles for
this style of storytelling has begun to emerge:

Plot and character dominates. As with any form
of storytelling, a good Web-based story depends on a compelling
plot and interesting characters. Nothing about this critical
part of storytelling has changed.

Build your world as a set of Web sites. Create
the world of your story by building one or more Web sites
corresponding to the characters and organizations featured
in the story. The visual designs of the sites are critical:
They must look appropriate for the roles they play in the
story. Characters in the world may have other forms of
Internet presence, such as e-mail, just like real people.

This is a game... The interactivity inherent in The
Beast and other events like it have blurred the notions
of story and game to the point where it
often seems more natural to speak of these events as
games, and the participants as players. This is a linguistic
tendency that I'm likely to adopt in this report.

...but it's not a game. Release the sites on the
Web as if they had been created by real people and organizations.
The site design should minimize any evidence that the sites
and the events depicted in them are fictional [5, 6].

Tell the story by evolving the sites' content,
in much the same way that real-world Web site and blogs
change with time and reflect events taking place in the
real world. Instead of simply telling the story, show the
results of actions taking place in the story's world and
leave it to the players to figure out what those actions
were and why they occurred. In a very real sense, this
is one big exercise in inductive reasoning. Participants
are challenged to actively understand what's going on in
the story world, so that they can properly interpret past
events and predict future ones.

Monitor and adapt. Like any Web-based property,
it's important to watch the event carefully and make sure
that your story is getting across. If it's not, it might
be possible to improve the flow of the game by adjusting
the design of the Web properties and the ways in which
they convey the story to the players, or, as a last resort,
revising the story itself.

Design principles in action: The creation of Exocog

On a personal basis, I found myself tracking the release
and evolution of these projects, and getting more and more
interested in them. As an interaction design consultant who
often works on Web site design and development, they struck
me as being a new and creative use of the technologies I
work with every day. I was also spending more of my professional
time on the use of the Web as a marketing tool, and these
events brought a new perspective to many of the promotional
issues with which I was concerned. They also raised the more
pragmatic question, always in the mind of a consultant, of
whether there was a business opportunity worth pursuing here.

But how to pursue it? I had no connections to movie studios
or their marketing and advertising agencies, and nobody was
going to hire me to promote their movie, sight unseen. My
solution was to adopt a guerilla strategy: I would just pick
a movie and act as if I had gotten the job of promoting it.
Better to ask forgiveness than permission.

There were obviously some things to be wary of in this strategy.
I would need to be careful to not tread on copyright and
other legal issues. In fact, this wasn't hard. From a promotional
perspective, the goal of a project like this isn't to tell
the story being told by a movie, but simply to inhabit a
space thematically close to the movie. As Blair Witch and The
Beast suggested, telling a back-story or side-story related
to the movie, but with a completely different plot and characters,
would be a reasonable way in which to proceed.

So, in early 2002, I began to look for a movie that would
be a reasonable subject for a self-funded, four-to-six-week
event. I chose Minority Report; like The Beast's
target of AI, another Spielberg movie, this time based
on a short story by Philip K. Dick [3] about a future society
in which "precogs" -- humans with the ability to foresee
the future -- were used to detect and prevent murders about
to happen. This made sense from a number of perspectives.
Its science-fiction focus would, I presumed, be a good match
to an Internet-based audience, and the story had a conspiratorial
tone that promised the kinds of suspense and conflict needed
for a good story. I expected the shooting script of Minority
Report to be rather different than the original story,
but that was fine: My concern was with the overall world
depicted in the story, and whether I could find an appropriate
space nearby in which to experiment.

So, I got the project started: I formed a six-person team
of writers and visual designers (all volunteers), started
developing the story and the Web content, and got the event
ready for release. Before going into detail about how this
was done, and how the design principles discussed above influenced
the event's design, it's probably best to provide an overview
of the story and how this played out on the Internet.

The story behind Exocog

In the interest of staying away from the plot of Minority
Report, I chose to avoid the crime-fighting orientation
of the movie and instead wrote about a near-future world
in which precogs were becoming the basis for commercial
activity. This gave me a viable set of heroes and villains
on which to base the story, while not risking any collisions
with the content of the forthcoming movie.

Briefly, the story is:

A company called Exocog has announced
their intentions to provide precognitive services -- product
forecasts, competitive analyses, and the like -- to any
client with an interest and ability to pay. However, Peter
Glenstone, Exocog's unscrupulous president, has a secret
plan to use precogs to collect government secrets that
he can then sell to foreign agents or organized crime.
He has begun a collaboration with the Institute for
Precognitive Studies, a university-affiliated research
institute, and has bribed Richard Dexforth, the
director of the Institute, to find ways of getting maximum
results out of a team of precogs, even at risk to their
health. But these experiments are not working, no matter
how hard he pushes. Peter concludes that his only viable
way out is to bilk his investors out of as much money as
he can, and leave the country. If bad things happen to
the precogs along the way, so be it.

Meanwhile, a young woman, Sarah Ames,
is trying to find out why she has lost contact with her
precog boyfriend, Jason O'Reilly. Sarah eventually
discovers that Jason had volunteered for an experiment
being run by Exocog, and is now being forced to participate
in Peter's experiments. Sarah is contacted by other precogs
(unofficially referred to as the Precog Chorus)
and by WeTheFuture, a secretive precog activist
organization led by Seth Rydel. They, with the help
of Richard, who comes to realize the wrongness of his actions,
break into Exocog's offices, free Jason, and expose Peter's
plans, sending him to jail one step ahead of his angry
investors.

While I was happy with this story as a starting point for
the project, what's most relevant to the current discussion
is the process by which the story was turned from a traditional
narrative into a set of Internet-based events that was played
out over a five-week period.

Defining the sites and the characters

Our team began the design of the sites for Exocog and the
other organizations with a basic outline of the sites' requirements,
and proceeded through much the same design process as we
would for any Web site. After all, that's exactly what we
were doing in the context of the event -- building Web sites
for clients. Of course, these designs also needed to be informed
by the plot of the story, so that all the appropriate sections
of the sites would be in place and ready to reveal whatever
bits of information the story called for.

The sites used in Exocog were:

Exocog (www.exocog.com):
A typical corporate
Web site of about 25 pages, with descriptions of its products
and services, office biographies, press releases, and an
entry point to its corporate Intranet. Game participants
eventually obtained "stolen" logins and passwords
for the Intranet, and were able to read Peter's e-mail
and private documents. Visitors could also join a mailing
list and obtain reports about upcoming Exocog product announcements.

Institute for Precognitive Studies (www.precogstudies.org):
Quite the opposite of the Exocog site, this was an intentionally
simple, even primitive collection of about 25 pages. The
Institute also had a mailing list and Intranet, and accepted
inquiries into research partnerships and visiting scientist
program.

Sarah's blog (blog.personalfusion.com/sarahblogger):
A typical blog (built,
in fact, with the commercial Blogger tool),
this was the announced entry point to the game. It featured
frequent commentaries from Sarah and occasional messages
from the Precog Chorus who had insights into what might
be happening with Jason. She also had a mailing list, and
invited interested people to "join her blog ring."

WeTheFuture (www.wethefuture.com): Stylistically
edgy, the participants behind WeTheFuture were prone to
manifesto-like statements about the state of precogs in
the world. They were also highly skilled at finding and
publishing embarrassing documents about Exocog.

We made every effort to create the illusion that these sites
were real, with real people and organizations behind them.
The sites were registered and taken live with appropriate
domain names. Characters identified in the game had functional
e-mail addresses, which were either stated on the sites or
were easily guessable. The Exocog and Institute sites
also offered addresses for typical corporate functions, such
as jobs@exocog.com. Mail sent to most of these personal
and corporate addresses activated some sort of autoresponder,
which returned an appropriate but noncommittal message to
the sender.

Together, these sites formed the foundation on which the Exocog story
would be told. But how the story would come together and
be told through the evolution of these sites' content is
another matter altogether.

The writing process

At its most basic, there was nothing unusual about the story's
creation. As it evolved, I worried about the same things
any author worries about -- whether the plot made sense,
whether the story's structure held together, whether the
conflicts among the characters properly motivated the action.
I gave some thought to how the story would ultimately translate
into a set of Web properties, but not a lot -- my primary
concern was to create a viable story and a set of characters
that players could care about.

Once I got to a reasonably detailed "treatment" of
the story -- a two-to-three page summary -- I abandoned the
usual narrative form, and began to specify how the story
would play out on the Web: How do the Web sites and related
Internet properties change over time, and how do these sequences
of events tell the story? My first attempts to go directly
from the treatment to specific events didn't work -- the
jump in detail was too great. So I broke the story down into
a set of five week-long "episode
summaries," which described how the overall story was advanced
during that week of the event. For example, the episode summary
for Week 2 was:

Traffic heats up on the WeTheFuture page. One
of the precog chorus announces receiving an unusual vision
or three. Sarah and Seth both discuss, in their blogs, a
meeting they had. Jason sends an email through some means
-- something of a cry for help.

At the end of the episode:

We know
and are in touch with some precogs with real powers, through
Sarah's blog and/or WTF.

We have
evidence that precogs are being mistreated by Exocog.

We hear
from Jason through a third channel, which means we might
have someone inside Exocog helping him (and us). He implies
that, if he's lucky, he might be able to get these out
on a regular basis.

We've
gotten a couple of clues about Exocog's shady business
deals.

The collaboration
between Exocog and the Institute is clear -- Richard is
in Peter's hip pocket. Exactly why, we're not sure, but
a combination
of money and blackmail seems likely.

WeTheFuture
has joined the fray, but there are tensions between their
"big picture" concern for precogs and Sarah's primary
concern for Jason. Nevertheless, they're a good source
of hacking skills, and passwords might show up there from
time to time.

Evolving sites tell the story

These episodic outlines provided the right level of detail
for me to plan exactly what would happen on the sites to
convey this part of the story. Here we encounter the critical
question of the project: How do you tell a story by manipulating
the content of a set of seemingly real Web sites? Sometimes,
of course, simply laying out a piece of information for the
players to read and act on was the simplest and most direct
way of moving the story forward. This was the primary technique
used in the WeTheFuture site and on Sarah's blog:
these were good places to report on Sarah's investigation
of Jason's disappearance, or to reveal stolen e-mail or documents
that advanced the plot in some way.

However, in real life, chains of story-like events don't
simply appear in print for us to read and understand. Most
of the time -- and especially on the Web -- we don't see
people doing things; rather, we see the results of
what they have done. We only know what has happened by collecting
the bits of information available to us, and inferring what
must have happened in the world to cause the observed events
to have occurred. So it is in the game world: Most of the
significant events that transpired in the Exocog story
were conveyed in this indirect manner. We used several techniques
[7] to lead our players through the story:

Content ambiguity:
Give the players some information that's ambiguous at the
time of its release, but that provides some indication of
where the story is going and that may be resolved by future
events. For instance, an e-mail message slipped out of Exocog
by a friendly informer might refer to a previously unknown
and potentially dangerous experiment. The uncertain contents
of this information will give players some new things to
look for as they move ahead, and perhaps lead them to re-interpret
some things from the past that hadn't made sense at the time.

Cross-event integration: The
payoff of content ambiguity: put several individually
ambiguous events together, and the meaning of all of them
becomes clear.

Storytelling by puzzles. Suppose
Sarah receives a text message from her boyfriend on her
cell phone:

38 37 104 45

Is that a telephone number that she (and
the players) should call? The IP address of a Web site
she should visit? Latitude-longitude coordinates? There's
an
implicit puzzle posed here to not just Sarah, but to
the players as well. The impact of such information on
the story
is generally not the content of the puzzle itself, but
the information that players get from the solution to the
puzzle
(e.g., the existence of a high-security Air Force base
at those lat-long coordinates).

Information hiding. Use
HTML or stylesheet coding tricks to make text invisible
on a Web page as rendered in a browser, but visible if
one inspects
the source for the page. Or, use stegographic or other
techniques to hide messages inside the GIF or JPEG images
that make
up a Web site.

Out-game property manipulation. Maybe
Peter has an account at Amazon -- it could be useful
to know he was interested in a book called Hide Your Assets and
Disappear.

These techniques, combined with the week-sized level of
detail in the episode summaries, allowed me to define what
would happen on the sites to convey the various parts of
the story, down to the level of what would happen on a particular
day and which team member was responsible for it. For instance,
the Week 2 episode summary above expanded out into the following
set of events for Tuesday of that week:

LIZ & JIM: PM: Image of a cellphone
message goes up on Sarah's blog: the Air Force base coordinates.
"lv u 34 45 104 45", which we're going to use as the
location of the government group of precogs about to be unveiled
(partly) by Precog1/Anders. (This will become known as the
"Cheyenne wiretapping" experiment inside Exocog.)

LIZ & STEF: Noon: We are introduced
(via Sarah's blog) to Precog 2, who has information about
something totally different (he/she sees armed men at a pier,
waiting, staked out for something, but nothing's happening,
sometime in August?) This makes no sense, on the outset;
he/she will try harder to localize it. Sarah: "I'm putting
this up in case it makes sense to anyone."

LIZ & JANET: Sarah and Richard trade
mail via Sarah's blog about the WeTheFuture mail: Richard
says that this was a reference to damaged servers, not injured
precogs – "I'm offended, stop listening to these people
who willfully misinterpret everything they see (and tolerate
theft as well), etc." This exchange is summarized on Sarah's
blog ("Even though I sent the original message out privately,
I think I owe it to Richard to post his response more publicly.")
However, Sarah wants to know more about WeTheFuture; she
will meet with them and will report back, one way or another.

Note that these specifications are still rather open-ended;
coming up with the ultimate content for the sites was left
to the people responsible for the various characters. This
gave the writers the creative room to make the characters
their own and give each of them a particular and distinct
voice. Note also the design challenge and the risk inherent
in this approach: The site updates needed to be interesting
enough to engage the audience, but simple enough that most
visitors would solve them. Otherwise, the game would become
either a boring affair that no one would care about or a
puzzling muddle that no one could understand. In practice,
achieving this balance can be difficult, and I'll have more
to say about this challenge later.

Taking the game live

Once the sites were built and their evolutions outlined,
it was time to launch the game. To do this, I posted messages
to two Internet groups devoted to exploring game-like events
like The Beast. We knew this limited announcement
would not have the impact of the publicity behind these better-known
games, but we were happy to keep this first project small,
the better to watch it and learn from what was going on.
In this message, I passed along the URL for Sarah's blog,
said that I had gotten this from a friend, and wondered if
anyone on the group knew what was it was about. We then sat
back and waited to see if anyone took the bait. They did.
The visitors were sophisticated in both these kinds of online
games and in their knowledge about the Internet; they understood
that someone was launching a game, and that they were being
invited to play.

We were now live, and our primary job as puppetmasters,
to use the players' term for the people running an event
like this, was to stick to our plan and roll out the changes
to the sites, unveiling the details of the story as we went.
But, obviously, we couldn't do this running blind. The players'
interaction with the sites needed to be monitored and evaluated,
just as with any Web site. But how to do this? The level
of detail in server logs was far too fine-grained and abstract,
and didn't give useful information about whether players
were able to follow the game and its story. Were they mostly
able to stay on top of the story, or were they in need of
some help?

Monitoring the game at a useful and informative level would
have been almost impossible, were it not the case that Internet-based
forums often spring up as a meeting place for players involved
in these games. Too many things go on in the games for anyone
to do everything by himself or herself. If players are to
be successful -- and, of course, if they're to have fun --
they need a clearinghouse for reporting discoveries, debating
theories, and generally socializing with each other, in and
out of the context of the game. The Cloudmakers site
emerged to serve this purpose for The
Beast, and we were fortunate that a similar group formed
at the Alternate Reality Gaming Network, or ARGN,
the successor to Cloudmakers, to provide a place for Exocog players
to congregate. (More recently, the Unfiction site
has taken on many of the services
originally provided by ARGN, e.g., the Unfiction
forum for I
Love Bees. Deaddrop is
also a valuable resource for these events.)

These discussion boards are an invaluable resource to people
behind events like Exocog, as they provide a very
clear picture of what is and isn't working in the game. They
also allow puppetmasters to be riskier in the design of their
game: They can plant a clue in a relatively obscure part
of the game world, and know that if just one player finds
it, it will soon be publicized on the boards and many more
players can add it to their understanding of the game. But,
beyond their role as a feedback mechanism, it's fair to say
that these boards are the real locus of the gaming activity.
As the creators of Exocog, we may have been providing
the fodder for the players, but the true activity of the
game was the social interaction of the players as they worked
together to work through the clues, and collectively understand
the story. We came to realize that what we were really doing,
through our Web site and e-mail manipulations, was creating
a social event. The people who came to the ARGN board may
have gone there in search of information, but if they stayed,
it was because they valued the sense of community that grew
out of the players' shared interactions on the board. As
we proceeded through the game, more and more of our attention
was devoted to nurturing this sense of community, through
our own properties as well as the ARGN board. There's much
more to be said about the relationships between games and
these discussion groups; some further thoughts on how these
groups co-existed with Exocog can be found in [7].

While we didn't have the budget or the outside marketing
connections to get the visibility needed to attract large
numbers of players, we were pleased by the response. We received
over 150,000 visits to all our sites, and were able to identify
over 2600 unique visitors by an analysis of server log IP
addresses; once the multiplying effects of proxy servers
were considered, the visitor count would surely be larger.
A more detailed analysis of the logs identified 520 visitors
by clearly unique host names and/or IP addresses, and we
were able to evaluate in some detail how and when they came
into the game, and to what extent they participated in it.
Of these people, 38 percent came to a game site on more than
one day, and, of them, 50 percent returned to a game site
during the last two days of the game's activity, a date that
had been suggested as end-of-game by headlines on the Exocog site
and by the impending theatrical release of Minority Report.

Figure 1 (right) shows a plot of the number of people who
entered the game during the days of its run. There were clearly
spikes
in participant acquisition, and we have never been able to
learn what outside events led to these spikes. However, this
graph also confirms that we continued to gain participants
all the time the game was active. All told, we have good
reason to believe that we were successful at creating an
event that, throughout its run, continually attracted new
participants and maintained the attention of those who got
involved in it.

Looking back: What's hard about this?

Running the Exocog game was a very intense experience,
growing out of the demands of keeping to a rigorous schedule
and satisfying an audience with high creative standards.
Looking back, there were three particular areas where the
challenges were the greatest. None of these are simply problems
to which solutions can be applied; rather, they are issues
that must be managed.

Maintaining continuity

In events like Exocog, players scan the content of
in-game Web sites with amazing care, in search of clues about
how the game will proceed. If there are continuity errors
on the sites -- incorrect
dates, mixing up the names of characters, creating evidence
that a character was in two places at once
-- the players will find them, and both the realism and the
credibility of the game will go down. Planning is critical,
and an essential part of a game plan is a clear timeline
of all the important events in the game, showing each game
character's involvement and the character's involvement in
them. The event schedules we created served us well; once
the game went live, charts like Figure 2 (right) were helpful
in keeping track of when the various events were scheduled
to
take place, and which ones had or hadn't already been taken
live. In this figure, each note represents a specific event,
with annotations recording its status in the game.

The corollary to having a good plan is to avoid making any
changes to the plan in the hopes of making things somehow
"better," unless
the changes are absolutely necessary. It's hard to reconstruct
all the aspects of the plan and check a new proposal against
them while the game is underway -- it's far too easy for
continuity problems to slip in. For similar reasons, we chose
to not respond to the e-mail messages that players were sending
to game characters. Aside from the fact that our ability
to offer individual responses wouldn't have scaled to more
than a small number of messages, the content of these messages
would have been a ready source of continuity errors. (On
the other hand, I Love Bees found ways to build player-generated
e-mail, even individual telephone calls to players, into
the game [9].) Some real-time tweaking of these kinds of
games is probably inevitable -- even the best plan can have
problems or even outright errors at execution time -- but
it's wise to tread carefully here.

Keeping the game going

We alluded earlier to the risks inherent in using ambiguity
as a tool in telling the game's story and motivating the
players to keep exploring the game world. What happens if,
despite their efforts, some critical piece of information
isn't found, and an equally critical inference about the
state of the game can't be made? The players' progress is
halted, but the timeline is demanding that the game move
on.

When this happens, several alternatives exist, none of which
are good:

Put the game's progress on hold until the critical information
is found by players. This runs the risk that the game goes
stale and the players begin to wonder, privately and on
the discussion boards, why nothing seems to be happening.

Keep things running per schedule, running the risk that
the game's progress gets so far ahead of the players' understanding
of it that nobody knows what's going on.

Patch the game in real-time on the fly: perhaps provide
another route to the information.

Roadblocks like these occurred twice during the running
of Exocog, although in both cases we were lucky and
players broke through the blocks just as the game needed
to move on. In general, this concern tends to push game design
in a conservative direction, but this is better than finding
a game stalled or confusing. There's nothing wrong with having
a few parts of the game that only a few motivated people
will find -- it's a good reward for their dedication. But
it's not a good idea to put high-risk events on the main
path of the story.

Getting enough content

From a puppetmaster perspective, there is simply never enough
content for these games. Do a major site update, and, an
hour later, the most devoted players have absorbed it and
are begging for more. This strikes fear into the puppetmaster
heart: You become convinced that these people, who have the
greatest interest in the game, are about to get bored and
abandon it. But coming up with more content on the fly isn't
the answer. It risks introducing continuity errors into the
game and ultimately just whets the appetites of devoted players:
More content leads to a desire for still more.

The Beast used puzzles (sometimes remarkably complex
ones) as a way of keeping players busy between updates. I
Love Bees had their players chasing down calls to pay
telephones so as to "activate the axons" of one of the
game's AIs [9]. In Exocog, we came upon the idea of
getting the players to generate their own content, which
we could then introduce into the game in a controlled way.
For instance:

The Institute for Precognitive
Studies initiated a "visiting scientist program,"
and invited players to submit research proposals for
the experiments they, as potential visiting scientists,
hoped to carry out during their stay at the Institute.
We collected these for a week, and then published them
on the Institute Web site for "peer review" -- other
players were encouraged to read the proposals and submit
reviews of them. Over the three weeks that this program
was in place, we received nine proposals and several
reviews, all of which generated considerable game site
and discussion board traffic.

The Institute also offered "Web-based
precognitive screening tests," through which the Institute
claimed to be able to identify people with significant
precognitive abilities who might be suitable for future
work with the Institute. Interested players were invited
to submit a form on which they had made predictions about
random events in the Institute's world (e.g., whether the
Institute's director would gain or lose weight on his diet)
in the hopes of receiving a high precognitive ability score
and appearing on an Institute Web page that honored promising
new precogs. Like the visiting scientist program, this
testing was pure game play -- we made up the scores at
random, and gave everyone who participated a score that
indicated high precognitive ability -- but over 40 of our
players took part in each of the three weeks of "testing"
we carried out.

Thirteen of our players took
Sarah up on the offer to join her blog ring, and sent
us links to precog-themed Web sites that they had created
as
a side effect of their participation with Exocog.
The sites, depicting such things as a precog-based healthcare
provider, a detective agency, and a competing research
organization, were created for no reason other than their
creators' affinity
with the Exocog game and the chance of finding
themselves listed on Sarah's blog.

These activities and others like them paid off for everyone:
We got new content for the site that enriched our game world,
kept our players busy and interested, and reduced the pressure
on us to generate new content of our own. They also provided
something special to the players who put in this additional
effort: The activities were way for them to gain a visible,
personal presence inside the Exocog world. The players
clearly wanted some way to get inside the game, and these
techniques gave us a way to let them in, but in a controlled
and managed way that didn't overwhelm us or threaten the
game's stability.

Three issues for the future of immersive games

As I look back over the Exocog project, and look
forward at the opportunities that lie ahead, there are three
issues I think are central to these kinds of events, and
that need some careful attention.

How do you build an audience?

Reliable data about the sizes and natures of the audiences
for these kinds of events are hard to come by. Most of the
events we've discussed here are marketing-oriented, and businesses
generally don't release that kind of information, whether
good or bad. The few statistics that are publicly available
include reports that The Beast got two million unique
visitors over its run [5], and I Love Bees reported
receiving one million visitors in its first three months
[11]. While these are impressive numbers, especially for
Web sites that receive little if any formal advertising,
a statistic I'd very much like to see is some measure of
the number of committed players in these games --
perhaps the number of people who came to a game site three
or more days per week -- and how this statistic changed over
the run of a game. The "80/20 rule" will almost certainly
apply here: Most of the activity in a game will come from
a relatively small percentage of the participants, and there's
nothing wrong with that. But, speaking from my own experience,
it's easy to find yourself evolving a game in ways that will
primarily benefit your more vocal and dedicated players a
more enjoyable experience, even if those differences make
the game less accessible to casual players. Is it possible
to keep the dedicated players happy while still reaching
out to a broader audience?

Building an audience is hard in any medium, and it's perhaps
especially hard in these kinds of events, where the Web sites
evolve as the game proceeds. It's hard for a new player to
join a game like Exocog in the middle, because they
can't experience the evolution of the game sites from their
initial state to their current form. It's not like opening
a book in the middle, getting interested, and backing up
to start at the beginning. Volunteers on ARGN-type discussion
boards often provide summaries of "the game so far" as
a starting point for new players, but there's considerable
risk in betting the success of your game on the chance that
some unknown person will do this (and keep it up to date,
and do a good job, and so on).

As much as we hoped that a discussion board would evolve
for Exocog, we also tried to address these concerns
in the game's design. This was another part of the reason
for our taking an episodic approach to our story. While we
inevitably built the game around the telling of a single
story, we tried to structure the weekly episodes so that
players could enter the game at the beginning of any episode
and need only a simple summary of the preceding episodes
to follow the new activity, and, ultimately, the outcome
of the main story. Providing this history was the purpose
of the weekly summaries on Sarah's blog -- to get all the
players, including the newer ones, onto an equal footing
before moving on. (Dana's
blog served a similar purpose in I Love Bees.)

Of course, not all games are, or should be, alike. There's
nothing wrong with a game that caters to people willing to
make a commitment to their participation. Modern video games
require their players to make a substantial commitment in
terms of time, software, hardware, and sometimes monthly
fees, and that hasn't stood in the way of their selling millions
of units. In other cases, long-term player involvement with
a Web event may not be essential to meeting the event's business
goals -- impulse purchase decisions might only require a
brief interaction with a game. Ultimately, these issues are
different facets of a much broader set of questions about
the structure of these games and the relationship between
a game and its audience.

How should you situate your event
in the real world?

One of the main bits of conventional wisdom for these kinds
of events is that you must portray their Web presences as
being completely real -- any evidence that this is "only"
a game is to be avoided as it breaks the illusion of reality
you are working so hard to create. We followed this rule
with Exocog; the only explicit indications that the
game was not real was that the pages had a copyright date
of 2013. While maintaining this illusion wasn't particularly
difficult, I'm no longer so sure about the need for purity
here.

What must happen for a game experience to be successful
is that players must be able to act as if the experience
is real, regardless of what they know to be literally true.
Players experiencing The Beast obviously knew that
it was not the year 2142 and that robots with human-like
intelligence were not walking the streets among us. Similarly,
it was clear from the Exocog discussions on the ARGN
site that our that players were quite able to think about
their participation in the game in different ways, treating
the game as either a reality in which they were interacting
("We have to warn Richard that Peter wants to kill him!")
or as a subject for discussion ("Is there going to be another
site update today?"). It has always been possible for people
to enjoy movies, books, and the theater while knowing that
these experiences are staged creations: In all these cases,
the audiences choose to and are able to consciously take
a stance of reality towards these events, even though they
know them to be fictional. Web-based events should be no
different.

Further, it's possible for an insistence on faux-ness to
work against a project. For instance, part of the promotion
of the movie Godsend included a faux Web site for
the Godsend
Institute,
a fictional research institute that, in the movie, was able
to create human clones. While visitors could reach the Godsend
Institute site from the movie's more traditional press-kit
site, many visitors to the faux site arrived there as a result
of doing a Google search for information on cloning, since
the marketing organization had purchased "cloning" as
a Google AdWord. Since there was no explicit connection between
the institute site and the movie, and since the content of
the site was not significantly different than real pro-cloning
sites that can be found through similar search techniques,
it was quite possible for visitors to mistakenly assume that
the Godsend Institute was real. Not only did this
absence of a connection fail to connect the visitors to the
movie -- the ultimate point of a movie's marketing campaign
-- but the controversial and emotionally-laden nature of
the site and the movie content ultimately led to a considerable
amount of bad publicity for the movie, once the site was
determined to be just a part of a movie promotion [4].

What determines when or whether you can relax the rules
of faux-ness? Our recent experience with these sites suggests
that there are several factors in making this decision:

The extent to which a
game's premise is obviously non-real. As with The
Beast, the description of a world of robots and intelligent
houses should be sufficiently non-real that it's probably
safe to portray the Web sites as real. But since claims
about dramatic advances in cloning technology have not
been uncommon in recent years, more caution with the faux-ness
of the Godsend Institute site would have been wise.

The way in which visitors
discover the game. If visitors arrive at the game
from a game-oriented Web site, a TV commercial for the
promotional
target, or press coverage of the game itself, it's reasonable
to assume that they know they're in a game world, and
you can proceed with faux-ness. But if they arrive through
a Web search on a not-uncommon term like "cloning," that
assumption is less reasonable.

The business intent of
the site. If the site has been put in place as
a promotional device, its faux-ness might be relaxed
to be sure that
the promotional connection between the site and the
subject of the promotion is evident. (See the Stepford
Wives site for an example of a site that
uses faux content in a way that is clearly associated
with the movie it's promoting.)

The subject matter of
the site. The controversial and emotional aspects
of cloning expressed on the Godsend Institute site,
when portrayed as reality, clearly upset some of its
visitors. These concerns might have been lessened if
the promotional
nature of the site had been made clearer. Or, pushing
this issue to the extreme, the faux site technique
simply may
not have been an appropriate way to promote this movie's
content.

These are only rules of thumb, and they can interact with
the real world in unexpected ways. Orson Welles presumably
thought that the idea of Martians landing in New Jersey would
be sufficiently non-real that he could proceed with his broadcast
without continual reminders to the audience that it was just
a radio play. But the quality of the work and the tendency
at the time to believe anything presented on the radio in
a realistic way led to a quite different outcome -- in some
cases, literal panic in the streets.

Are these games working as promotional
devices?

It would be a mistake to rush too quickly into business-level
thinking about these games. We're still in the pre-theoretical
stages of their development, and we should be thinking broadly
about the games and what practical roles they might play.
But we can't ignore this discussion, either. Even now, these
games take time and money, and if they're going to find their
place among other forms of entertainment, sooner or later
they're going to have to pay for themselves.

So far, there have been no significant Beast-like
games where players have been willing to pay to play. Electronic
Arts' Majestik (2001) tried flat-fee and per-month
models; the game was ultimately unsuccessful, although it's
not clear to what extent this was due to its non-free status.
Experiments with alternative models are underway -- sponsorship
and product placement, or purchasing in-game accessories
similar to how Thereallows participants
to customize the appearance of their avatars by purchasing
clothing and hairstyles -- but the viability of these approaches
are as yet unclear.

As a result, the primary business justification for Web-based
events has been that discussed here: a promotional device,
especially for the entertainment industry. This is a challenging
role for Web-based events to play. They can be built relatively
inexpensively, and they have the potential to reach a large
number of people, but they are competing against forms of
promotion and advertising with much better understood business
models and a greater ability to predict their return on investment.
So let me offer a few questions about the promotional aspects
of these games that might help focus their design as effective
promotional devices:

How much is too much? This
is really a return-on-investment question: At what point
does further development in a game stop returning value?
Would a one-month version of I Love Bees have motivated
the sale of just as many copies of Halo 2 as the three-month
version? This is also a question about the degree of game
complexity that potential players are willing to tolerate.
If your goal is to attract a large number of possibly casual
participants, simple is better than complex. But if you're
looking to build a relationship with a smaller but dedicated
group of players willing to commit time and effort to the
game, complexity may not be a barrier to success. Both The
Beast and I Love Bees attracted very large numbers
of visitors, and complex, time-intensive multi-player Internet-based
games like EverQuest have signed up hundreds of thousands
of players on a regular basis, even at $10 or more per month.

What are you promoting? There
are specific and general components to any promotion: I
Love Bees is as much a promotion for Bungie's brand
as it is for the Halo 2 game itself. Thus, extra
effort on I Love Bees could be justified as a
way of building a stronger connection between gamers
and Bungie, even if
the direct impact of this additional effort on Halo 2 sales
is limited.

Don't count on free publicity. Don't
confuse the publicity created by an event with
publicity generated about the event. The properties
promoted by the Blair Witch, The Beast,
and I Love
Bees sites gained a lot of attention simply because
their use of the Internet was novel enough to attract
attention
to itself, and thus to the properties. As these events
become more common, this secondary publicity will become
less common.

What's the scope of the
promotion? Is the event aiming for a short- or long-term
payoff? Since these games generally play out over an
extended period of time, they may be better suited for
building
an audience over time (as was the case with the Blair
Witch site) than to simply motivate a quick purchase
decision (e.g., "What movie should we see tonight?")
Nevertheless, some of the techniques from these games,
such as faux Web
sites, may be effective ways of drawing short-term interest
to a property.

A place to play

I believe we're seeing something significant in the ways
in which games like The Beast, I Love Bees,
and Exocog have made use of the Internet as a game
and storytelling medium. The success of these events validates
the notion of the Internet as a place to simply play.
And this is a form of play that can make complex demands
on its participants, keep players active and involved over
weeks if not months, and serve as the birthplace of rich
personal relationships. Most importantly, this sense of play
is one that, by calling upon traditional notions of plot
and character, bridges the gap between game and story.

We're at a very early stage in the development of this genre.
The power and opportunities introduced by its technological
base are still coming to be understood, and we're still learning
the parameters of success and failure. Every experiment teaches
us something useful, and I'm hopeful that my experiences
with Exocog can provide some insights into the strengths
and weaknesses of the genre, and where the genre may someday
go. Ultimately, this is a story that is far from over.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to my collaborators in this project: Philip
Andrews, Stefanie Jones, Sameer Ketar, Janet Miller, and
Liz Miller. I am also indebted to the team at ARGN and the
many people who participated in the game, especially those
whose comments on the ARGN boards kept us on our toes, and
to Chuck Clanton and Sean Stacey for helpful comments on
an earlier draft of this paper.

References

1. Coover, R. The End of Books. New
York Times Review of Books, June 21, 1992.